Reviews by MathBrush
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Complex and puzzly one-room murder mystery, November 23, 2023This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!
Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.
The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.
This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.
There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.
At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.
There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.
Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.
Twine and TADS combine to evoke nostalgia and care for a child, November 23, 2023This is another game I tested, a hybrid of Twine and TADS.
The idea is that you are an adult (or teen) woman with a boyfriend/partner. Your father is dying of cancer, and could go at any time. You find out that your partner has been working with him on a game (written in TADS) to present to you, years after he started.
The TADS game consists of a house filled with materials for a party. You have to gather up enough stuff to enter the party: a costume, a thing to share, and an invitation. There are 5 ways to satisfy each category. Parts of the house additionally contain journal entries reflecting real-world issues the father had over time.
I really liked the concept of sandwiching a TADS game between twine games, and I like that it works both online and in downloads.
As a beta tester, I’m not sure how effective I was. I found 1 or 2 of the paths (I especially focused on the board game in testing), but that means I neglected 3 or 4.
And that’s both the blessing and the curse of this game: the multiple paths are very clever, allowing people to bypass a lot of puzzles and get to the end, contributing to a more relaxed atmosphere and helping casual people play.
On the other hand, that means that players (and inadequate testers like me) will only see 20-40% of the game. I’ve written before about how having ‘hidden bonus content’ in your game can make the game very very rewarding for those who find it, but overall tends to drag down the score as most people don’t see the hard work you do (Hanon’s game Transparent I think is a good example, where it’s a beautifully complex and rich game that hides most of it below the surface).
I enjoyed on this second playthrough figuring out the computer/radio problem, although I used hints several times. There was a minor hiccup at the end. I did find the puzzle fun and like the solution, though.
The twine scenes are, I think, descriptive and emotional. This kind of writing, with end of life care, can be really hard to write because everyone mourns in a different way. It’s almost impossible to provide options that meet everyone’s way of dealing with grief; one alternative is to write a strong personality for your protagonist and just provide options that are believable for that personality.
I feel like this game leans towards the second choice. Our protagonist has been deeply impacted by the trauma of cancer, and many options hover between ‘soldier through stoically’ and ‘allow sorrow to briefly overcome you’. This provides a contrast to the upbeat, cheery and often child-like TADS game. I think that the reactions of the protagonist are realistic, for a certain type of person and personality; yet at the same time, there is, in me, perhaps a longing for a positive and direct reconciliation and expression of appreciation that the game does not afford. There is in me a desire to have happy endings for games, but also to write games that do not have happy endings (my original ending for Grooverland was to have the main character frozen as a statue forever in a theme park, but CMG talked me out of it as too depressing).
Overall, I find the complex systems and puzzles of the TADS part and the dialogue and descriptiveness of the Twine part to be the best aspects of the game.
Frat brothers cast spells at each other and bond, November 22, 2023I like this game, one that I tested it. Even though it’s longer, I replayed the whole thing before this review, and one of the hardest puzzles in my current WIP was influenced by a puzzle in this game that I really liked.
It’s a Twine game with a parser influence. Like Scott Adams style games, the screen is split into an upper and lower part, but unlike them, the bottom remains mostly static while the top changes. The game has quadratic complexity, as you choose an action and then choose a noun to apply it to, which can be an object in -game or yourself on the sidebar.
Gameplay revolves around discovering and using new spells, which are in a two-syllable format. Over time, the spell system develops some complexity and richness.
Story-wise, you are an initiate in a fraternity of wizards, completing your final initiation: a magical paintball tournament. You have to defeat your brothers while also coming to know them.
I’ve seen some concerns in other reviews about the way you get to know them: by casting a spell that lets you live out other people’s memories, generally their most traumatic. The original version of the game did not include explicit consent for that action, while the most recent does.
From my point of view (which is subjective), this game is clearly fantasy. Not just wizards and spells fantasy (though it has that), but also a fantasy of friendship and understanding. The dream of having a circle of friends so close that you can share anything between you. In fact, there are a lot of clues in the paintball game itself that the whole thing is kind of a setup, a way for people to get to know you; it’s really quite possible that this mind sharing was intended.
Except…parts of the game indicate that the mind spell is newly rediscovered and exciting.
But that’s one aspect of the game I only really noticed now as a player. It’s really trying hard to tell three different stories at once:
1-A goofy game of paintball between fraternity friends with whacky spells and silly pledge rules
2-A dark and serious exploration of humanity’s injustice to those who are different from them
3-A heartwarming tale of acceptance and overcoming insecurity.
So I think part of the problem other reviewers identified isn’t so much that the idea of furrowing through someone’s mind is inherently bad for a story, but that the significance of events and characters takes on really different shades of meaning depending on which part of the story they’re in. Riptide, the frat brother in a treehouse, is a comic individual; Riptide, the oppressed child who essentially experienced torture, is not (I think that was the right character, but I’m not sure).
Overall, though, I enjoyed each subplot separately and found them worthwhile, but I’m not sure they coalesce into a greater whole (something I’ve been concerned about with my own game, which has a similar mix of the flippant and the dark).
Puzzle-wise, it’s outstanding, but also very difficult. I’d likely chalk up the low number of reviews to the puzzles, which are among the most difficult I’ve seen for choice based games of this size, requiring several leaps of intuition and a lot of experimentation. I had to get help several times on my first playthrough, but none this time around.
Overall, I found this satisfying.
Single-key dungeon crawler with increasingly complex powers, November 22, 2023This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).
Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.
Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.
But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.
This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.
Multiplayer mystery with boardgame-style gameplay and characters from history, November 22, 2023This game is not archived, but I’m only reviewing it by request. (although technically it’s open on github so I guess that’s the same thing!)
There have been several multiplayer IF games in recent years, many of them by this author. Approaches to multiplayer IF have varied; there are parser games where codes must be passed back and forth and collaboration is key; twine games where codes are passed back and forth but no other communication is meant to be made; and games like this that utilize a server.
This is a very well written and technically proficient game. I think I’m going to divide my thoughts on this game into three areas: the story/writing, the mechanics, and the multiplayer aspect. Because this game works well and the author is proficient, I’m going to be a bit more critical than I would with a newer author, since I think this author values thoughtful criticism (and I hope I’m thoughtful!)
Story and writing
The main storyline is that you are Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony being the Vice President (I assume of the US) and Cleopatra being the Queen of Egypt (I wonder what it would be like if the vice president in real life was married to a monarch of another state. That’d be pretty interesting!). The two of you have been asked to solve the murder of Marlon Brando. You have around two weeks to gather clues, conduct interviews and investigations, and to make an accusation.
The story has varied suspects with differing motivations and interests. I’ve played a lot of other detective games where everyone just kind of blends together, a lot of rich white british people who have no distinguishing characteristics. But in this game, each character is very different. Interviewing Rasputin was memorable, and Vitruvius was very different from James Dean, who was very different from the General.
You’ll notice all the names are taken from famous characters in history. That’s part of the conceit here; kind of like Clone High or Fate Grand Order (neither of which I’ve watched or played), all of the characters are characters from history, modified to fit into a single scenario. For instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean both work at Raytheon.
This is clever, but to me the influence of the character’s historical figure is like La Croix; it’s not really there, just a hint of it. For most of the characters you could have swapped them with some other historical figure and there would be little difference. If it has been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Cleopatra, much of the game could have remained the same, outside of the Blood Diamonds bit. James Dean could have been Timothy Chalamet, etc. The only character that seemed heavily influenced by their historical counterpart is Rasputin. For the others, it mostly seemed like the name was just tacked on with a reference or two (Napoleon’s coat) with the mental associations meant to be developed by the reader.
But that’s not to say the characters aren’t developed; they’re very well developed! Just not in ways that strongly justify the unusual character choices.
The storyline itself was really interesting, and I liked seeing how things developed out and new storylines emerged.
Mechanics
You’re given a calendar with several blank days, each day with two appointments to make. You can schedule interviews or visiting locations (I thought you had to do one of each at first, but later I doubled up on appointments once I realized you can do so). Once in a meeting, you can mostly just click every link, although there are occasional choices you can make that make a difference. So the real strategy lies not in each individual interview, but in which interviews to schedule.
I found that satisfying in the long run, as time began running out and I had to guess which meetings were most important to schedule.
I’ve mentioned before my informal classification of mystery IF:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This is a type 3 murder mystery. At the end you have to pick who did it and why.
I got it wrong, mostly because I psyched myself out about a character I hadn’t had a chance to interview. But the solution was logical!
Multiplayer aspect
I played this game twice, first as part of the Seatlle IF Meetup and then again on my own.
In the meetup, we only got through the first day after 30 minutes of playing. On my own, it took me over an hour to finish.
Overall, I usually play IF around other events in my life like meals, childcare, work, tutoring, etc. and so it’s pretty hard to find time to meet up with others to play IF. That’s why I tend to prefer multiplayer IF that has small amounts of text and short gameplay (like Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by the same author).
This game has a lot of text and long gameplay! There was also one time while (when playing with two browsers on the same computer) it said I was losing connection and might have everything reset without saving.
That says to me that this type of game may be more appropriate for a ‘multiple people in one room’ setting, like a TTRPG or boardgame, but digitally.
This feeling was strengthened once I realized that there’s not really special abilities for each of the two protagonists or information only one receives. There are certainly little details here and there and there are some witnessses where you get substantially different options, but by and large most of the multiplayer aspect is ‘do the two of you agree on this course of action’, which again to me sounds better for a cooperative game played by people in the same room.
Overall
This was a strong game, well made, and I enjoyed it. The multiplayer aspect and the historical figures weren’t compelling to me, and I believe the game could have retained much of its enjoyability without either one. But I’m glad it encouraged me to work with others and I’m glad I spent time with this.
Complex graphical escape room game with Victorian flair, November 22, 2023I really enjoyed this escape room game.
While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).
In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.
You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.
Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.
I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.
There do seem to be several red herrings.
I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.
Visually pretty game set on multiple worlds with time travelling orphan assassin, November 22, 2023I’ve seen a few people saying they felt out of the loop with this game since they didn’t play the earlier little match girl games. I can say (having played the first 3 but not the offshoots) that the only thing important from the first games is in the recap. This game does continuity kind of like early Adventure Time, with mostly ‘adventure of the week’ stuff with occasional throwbacks.
The game features some beautiful styling, with nice location descriptions, music, and scrolling text. I missed some of the intro timed text since my son asked me for help with something; timed text isn’t so much of a pet peeve as it is something that just doesn’t fit into my play style of fitting in games around the corners of my life. Fortunately the ending could be scrolled back if missed!
Apparently this game has a ton in common with Metroid Prime. I’ve never played that game, but I looked it up and there are quite a few similarities, even some cameos, if you can call it that.
The overall structure, like most of the Matchgirl games, is that looking into any source of fire (outside of the nighttime stars) will teleport the player to one of five or so worlds. There’s some nice variety here, including space, dinosaurs, wild west, etc. The Pirates of Penzance had a strong presence.
Each area has some kind of powerup that helps you explore other areas. In the meantime, there are different diversions (such as helping a goldfish or doing a time typing game).
I found the structure and side quests engaging and fun. The writing was flawless for me and had its moments of gravitas. I observed how it was done with interest, as my current WIP is structure much like this one, with different worlds or dimensions leading to some emotional moments. I liked how it worked here, so it gave me more confidence.
I did get stuck once. I suspected I had missed some exit. I used location based hints and quickly realized I hadn’t noticed an exit, and then solved the game soon after that.
I can see the weight of a long series making it hard for people to get invested in playing a game, but this one as a standalone might as well be the introduction to the series, as continuity isn’t really a major feature of the games. They can be played in just about any order.
It’s nice to see high quality in the comp. Between Ryan Veeder, JJ Guest, BJ Best, we have three former winners entering well-done games, as well as newcomers producing polished games of great value.
Funny Ikea/cult game about rituals, November 22, 2023This is a great-looking Inform game. Inform has the capacity to make ‘website templates’ that people can share with each other to make projects look nicer, but people rarely use them. I don’t know if this one uses a custom template or just had css/html edited manually, but it looks great.
The concept is really funny, too. What if IKEA instructions were summoning rituals for ancient Gods?
Actual gameplay revolves around following IKEA instructions closely. I found that fun, as I like both assembling and deassembling IKEA furniture. My school had to throw out some cabinets recently that had gotten old/bug-ridden, and I had a hammer and just deconstructed it from memory (remove the thin bar, then pry the back panelling, then remove the edge pieces, then break out the last bit of wood with the hammer, etc.)
Anyway, this game scratched that itch, which was nice. Most of the puzzles revolve around clever ways to use the instructions. The game was a little smaller than I first imagined, but in a good way, as it was beginning to get overwhelming.
I did have some trouble with phrasing. It was hard to find (Spoiler - click to show)an antonym for ‘insert’. The transcript shows my flailing about. I ended up also using hints for what I’d consider the biggest puzzle of the game, but it was entirely fair, I just was getting close to the 2 hour limit.
Complex puzzle game with language barrier set on an airship, November 22, 2023This was a nice, substantial puzzler parser game with some fun hand-drawn sketches.
It starts with a large chunk of made-up names which was a bit hard to parse at first, but that quickly settled down. Next, I got confused by the directions, but fortunately the map made that a breeze.
Then it settled down into a sequence of puzzles. You play as a foreigner on an airship whose brother has been accused of murder. Its your job to navigate the ship and collect evidence!
The game could have easily gotten overwhelming if not for the helpful tablet which kept clues and to-do tasks. I consulted it frequently.
I got halfway through the game without consulting hints. The second half, I had to consult hints for. It turns out that every time I needed hints, the answer was the exact same.
With one last note on the story, I did find it a bit odd how much we can do without getting in trouble. Like wandering into places we clearly should not be. So I had to suspend disbelief a bit. On the other hand, I enjoyed the many layers of information and the multiple endings and plots within plots. So I’ll be rating it highly.
Clever and funny game about out-tricking the devil in a small forest town, November 22, 2023This is a parser game about making a bargain with the devil. I decided to put Der Freischütz 1 in the background for its devil-dealing music.
This game was polished and well-thought through. You are a mad scientist/demonologist in the vein of Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Faust. You have summoned the devil in order to bargain the secrets of life from him. But, the cost may be too great…
Everything worked seamlessly in this game. At no point did I encounter anything I would consider a bug or a typo or bad puzzle design. At times it was leaning a little against my religious sensibilities but it always backed off before getting too harsh.
The writing is funny, with a fake-old-time language for an ancient grimoire that was able to contrast modern tropes with older grammar forms. All the NPCs, including the Devil, were played with a nice mix of intelligence and stupidity, just smart enough to oppose you and plenty dumb enough to fall for your tricks.
The puzzles seemed very hard at first, but through simple exploration I was able to make some guesses on what to do, and so while I had to think a lot, I never needed hints or a map.
The conversation system worked well, with both general topics and individual topics. It felt seamless for me.
So, I thought it was a great game. Very nice work!
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